Apple debuts its own credit card with a physical version to complement the app
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The app also gives you an overview of your spending and balance.
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“Daily cash” is accumulated daily, as the name implies, and as cash rather than as points.
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Apple Card app gives you a view of your weekly spending.
At Apple’s event on Monday, the company announced that it would partner with Goldman Sachs and MasterCard to offer its own credit card, not only within the Apple Wallet app but also as a physical metal credit card that can be used wherever Apple Pay isn’t accepted.
The Apple Card will come without any late fees, annual fees, over-limit fees, or international fees. The company promised a low interest rate, but that rate does not seem to have been made public yet. Instead of offering points, Apple’s card will apply cash to the customer’s card. Customers receive 2 percent cash back on purchases made with Apple Pay and 3 percent cash back on purchases made on Apple products.
On pure economics, Ted Rossman, industry analyst at CreditCards.com, said that Apple’s cash back terms were OK but not great. Rossman pointed to Citi’s Double Cash card, which offers 2 percent cash back on every purchase (not just purchases made with Apple Pay) or US Bank’s Altitude Reserve Visa Infinite card, which “gives three points per dollar on mobile wallet spending (worth 3 percent cash back or 4.5 percent off travel).”
“I definitely see why Apple is doing this: they want to juice Apple Pay usage (Crone says PayPal/Venmo has 267 million users versus 32 million for Apple Pay),” Rossman wrote. “Plus, as a merchant, they’ll save on interchange fees when Apple Card users buy something from Apple. And as a service provider, they’ll get a cut of Apple Card transactions elsewhere.”
Besides the financial considerations of Apple Card, the company is clearly trying to draw users in on customer-friendly accounting and repayment plans. The company showed off its app in front of its Cupertino, California, audience, stressing that it wanted to make repayment easier and more intuitive for users. The app shows total balance and weekly spending when you open it up, and a repayment screen allows customers to adjust their repayment period to see how much interest they would pay if they paid their credit back more quickly.
Apple Card will be available this summer. The company says that customers will be able to sign up and start using the card “in minutes” and that customer support will be available 24/7 through Messages.
On stage, Apple’s vice president of Apple Pay, Jennifer Bailey, said that the company will use machine learning to offer customers a clear, understandable merchant name in their transaction history. (Often, credit card statements show the merchant’s address or parent company, which can be confusing when a customer goes back over their credit history.)
The physical card, the digital security
Apple was one of the first major companies to tokenize customers’ third-party credit cards in the Apple Wallet app, offering an extra layer of security during transactions. Tokenization replaces a customer’s card number with a token, so the actual card number isn’t being passed back and forth in a way that would be susceptible to hacking.
Apple said its own card would keep customer information similarly stored. The token representing the card number is stored on a phone’s Secure Element—a separate chip that has little interaction with the phone’s full operating system.
When Apple Pay was first rolled out in 2014, Apple said that the token tying a transaction to a specific customer would be encrypted and stored on the Secure Element without being accessible to Apple. It sounds like the company will use the same setup for its card, writing in a press release that “The unique security and privacy architecture created for Apple Card means Apple doesn’t know where a customer shopped, what they bought, or how much they paid.”
In keeping with EMV standards that are now commonplace across the US, purchases are authorized by Apple Wallet with a “one-time unique dynamic security code” and authorized by the user with Face ID or Touch ID verification.
For its physical metal card, Apple has eliminated a lot of the weak points that allow hackers to steal card information in brick-and-mortar stores. The physical card has no number or CVV security code printed on it, and a date and a space for a signature are also notably absent. “All this information is easily accessible in Wallet to use in apps and on websites,” Apple explains. “For purchases made with the titanium Apple Card, customers will get 1 percent Daily Cash.”
Apple partnered with Goldman Sachs as the issuing bank to deliver its credit card, which will be MasterCard-branded. “As a newcomer to consumer financial services, Goldman Sachs is creating a different credit card experience centered around the customer, which includes never sharing or selling data to third parties for marketing and advertising,” Apple wrote in a press release.
Listing image by Apple
